On Wednesday the members of the NCAA men's basketball committee — the world knows them as the "selection committee" — went into sequester as they began to sort through the task of choosing and seeding and bracketing the teams for the 2013 NCAA Tournament.

It's not as though they are on total lockdown, though. They have TV to watch college basketball games. They have the internet to research information about the teams they'll consider. One presumes they can check Twitter if they wish. So here is hoping they will take a moment to read what we say here and consider some advice about how to ensure the next several days come out exactly right:

Kelly Olynyk and Gonzaga are hanging on to learn where they will play. (AP Photo)

Respect dominance

In 2010, Sporting News hit upon a formula that is a good deal less complex than whatever stroganoff of numbers goes into the Pomeroy or Sagarin ratings, or even the RPI. It might be hard to believe, but it's this: Winning matters.

The selection committee over the years, perhaps to promote better competition among those seeking to become part of the NCAA Tournament, has constructed a bias toward programs that "schedule tough." In many ways, this favors programs that happen to occupy powerful conferences, who therefore schedule tough merely by accepting the slate of conference games presented to them.

It also ignores a fundamental truth the tournament has underscored year after year: Teams that win, win.

We call it the .801 club — for teams that win better than 80 percent of their pre-tournament games. Last year's two NCAA finalists both were members, as were Elite Eight teams North Carolina and Syracuse. Last year, there were 14 members in the club. Although many were buried deep in the bracket, three outperformed their seeds and another six played to expectations. Of the five that fell short, four were major-conference powers.

In other words, that 28-5 record Middle Tennessee compiled is not the result of playing a steady diet of cream-puff Sun Belt teams. It's the result of going on the road 10 times in conference play and battling against the opposition's best effort and losing just once. So many of the teams that "surprise" everybody in the tournament are merely teams with extraordinary records the committee chooses to dismiss while embracing big-league powers that prove little more than they can win home games.

Most of the tournament's greatest seeding mistakes in recent years involved .801 club teams. Creighton 2012 as a No. 9 seed? Northern Iowa 2010 as a 9? Western Kentucky 2008 as a 12? That team had two pros, for goodness sakes. It would be a greater error to leave out one of these teams altogether.

Stop with the geography

Since the committee wisely stopped restricting teams entirely to their natural regions, and since the practice of allowing teams to play on their home courts was abolished, the worst turn the tournament has taken relative to competitive equity has been the drive to keep as many teams as possible close to home.

The "pod system" works fine. There's no reason the first couple games in the West Region can't be played in Dayton if that's the best way to balance the bracket.

The problem develops when the highest teams are placed on the bracket with a stronger consideration to where they are located than what combinations provide the fairest matchups.

If the committee is to order seeds 1-68, which it does, and if it is going to designate the team at the top of that list as its No. 1 overall seed, which it does, then it makes to present that top team with the clearest possible path to the championship. And yet in the name of saving a few pennies in travel costs and keeping athletics directors happy, that's what they've done.

The clearest example of this remains the 2011 bracket, when Ohio State at 32-2 was chosen as the No. 1 overall seed and then presented with a bracket that included a No. 2 seed (North Carolina) that was the ACC regular-season champion (and loaded with future pros) and a No. 4 seed (Kentucky) that had won the SEC Tournament title (and was loaded with future pros).

The committee knew the bracket was imbalanced and went ahead with it anyway. Because that put all of those teams, as well as No. 3 seed Syracuse, as close to home as possible.

Even with the emphasis on keeping teams close, Gonzaga had to travel to Pittsburgh for its first games last year, Louisville to Portland and Wisconsin to Albuquerque. In 2011, when the committee was failing to protect Ohio State, you had Duke and Connecticut playing their regional games in Anaheim.

If geography is to matter for some, but not for all, why bother with it? Why not put the No. 1 seeds as close to their natural region as possible and then bracket the field fairly from there?

Bracket early, often

Whenever we see one of those cutesy matchups in the tournament with a coach facing a school where he used to work and people in the media insist it was done for TV purposes — as if that's a storyline so powerful as to carry a two-hour telecast — the committee will defend itself by saying it doesn't even get around to bracketing until late in the process. So it can't possibly waste time being clever. The committee must get the whole thing to CBS in time for a 6 p.m. ET show.

Committee members don't need more time on bracketing to cook up more of these matchups. They need more time so they can ensure they put together the fairest and most equitable tournament.

Those serving on the committee have been known to say a team can play its way out of a bad seed, but it can't get into the tournament once it's excluded. So they spend days trying to parse that last team in the field.

However, with the expansion to 68 teams the back of the field is so far from qualified that any answer they choose is going to be right and any answer they choose is going to be wrong. They haven't left a legitimately qualified tournament team out more than once in the past half-dozen tournaments.

The truth is for the next three weeks the public will be consumed with what is transpiring with the whole of the bracket, not which of the bubble teams landed on the 12 line in Dayton. Getting that bracket exactly right — how the chosen teams are seeded and where they are placed — should be the first priority.